Verb fronting in Mandarin Chinese - Luis Vicente

Cheng & Vicente
Verb fronting in Mandarin
UCSC Linguistics Colloquium
October 31, 2008
An interface solution? — what the splitting effect is telling us is that double pronunciation in
this case is not reducible to morpho-phonological requirements. Rather, something external (interface
conditions, cf. Bobaljik 2002) forces both positions to have some phonetic realization. In this case, we
can get away with partial spellout because recoverability is not an issue.
If something like this is viable, there is still the question of how to restrict it to verbal clefts. This is
something we still don’t know how to do.
6 Conclusions
• Syntactically, verbal clefts and verbal lian...dou are unexceptional: they are instances of the
more general cleft and lian...dou constructions and, as in many other languages, they involve
A-bar movement of a verbal constituent.
• Semantically, there isn’t much to report either. Verbal clefts exhibit the verum focus reading
observed in predicate clefts in several other languages. Verbal lian...dou sentences have the even
meaning characteristic of the lian...dou construction.
• Phonologically, however, things are trickier. We have show that the trigger for double pronunciation
must be different for each construction.
Various issues left to solve:
• Why is the presence of negation obligatory in verbal lian...dou?
• Why do verbal lian...dou and (to a lesser extent) verbar clefts require the lower copy of the verb
to be clause final?
• What is the proper characterization and analysis of the splitting effect with bisyllabic verbs in
verbal clefts?
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